Yahoo monitored emails secretly for the US government

Last year, Yahoo built a custom software program secretly to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for particular information according to a request from US intelligence officials, as some reports announced.
The company abide by a classified US government directive, hacking hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the order from the National Security Agency (NSA) or FBI, only two former employees and a third person who knew about that program told Reuters.
Some spying experts said this shows that the first known case of a US internet company accepting a spy agency’s request by searching all arriving messages, as this is opposed to scanning a small number of accounts or examining stored messages in real time.

Yahoo faces a lot of questions after hacking of about half a billion accounts.
It is not specifically what information intelligence officials were searching for, but only all they wanted from Yahoo company is to search for a set of characters. That could mean a sentence in an email or an attachment, as the sources said.
Reuters wasn't able to know exactly what data Yahoo may have handed over, if any, and whether the intelligence officials had approached other email providers as well as Yahoo with this type of request.
According to what the two former employees announced, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s decision is to follow the directive troubled some senior executives and resulted in leading to the June 2015 departure of the chief information security officer, Alex Stamos, who is now heading security at Facebook.
The company said in a brief response to Reuters questions about the request that Yahoo is a law abiding company, and agrees to the laws of the United States.
Then Yahoo refused to say any further comment.

Andrew Crocker who represents the staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, explains that the use of the word “directive” was to describe the program indicated that the demand may have been ordered under the section 702 of the 2008 Visa Amendments Act, which enables the government to target non-US citizens abroad for spying.

Revelations that were announced by Edward Snowden about the Upstream and Prism programs that the Yahoo program looks like a hybrid, Crocker said that represent the US citizens who were also subject to huge surveillance.

The fourth attendant and amendment privacy concerns are very staggering as Crocker said. It seems like they are watching over all emails, even inside the US but the fourth amendment protects that fully. It’s hard to know how the government justifies requiring Yahoo to look for emails like that; there is no warrant that could potentially justify scanning all emails.

The request to search Yahoo Mail accounts came in a form of a classified directive sent to the company’s legal team, according to the three people who were familiar with the matter. US internet and phone companies are informed to have provided bulk customer data to intelligence agencies. However some private surveillance experts and former government officials said that they had not seen before either such a broad directive for real-time web collection or one that demanded the creation of a modern computer program.